


this is for the lonely

by pprfaith



Series: Vampire Character Studies [1]
Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Child Abuse, Family, Gen, Relationship Status: Nothing is as complicated as the Originals, Siblings, Spoilers for all seasons, Violence, introspective, non-linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 20:49:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3222980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elijah, keeping secrets and living forever. (A character study.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is for the lonely

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new to this fandom and, as always, I dip my toes in with weird, plotless character studies. Plural, this time. See series tag.
> 
> Un-betaed.

+

+

“You know what the problem with eternity is?” Klaus asks. It’s midnight and he’s standing in the bombed-out ruins of a church somewhere in Germany, arms spread under the moonlight shining in through the caved-in roof. 

Elijah sits on what’s left of the front pew, legs crossed at the ankle, watching his brother act out his endless, endless play. 

After a moment of silence, the younger vampire looks at him and answers his own question. “It takes a hell of a bloody long time.”

+

There are six children of Mikael, five sons and a daughter and they will be remembered throughout history as the original horrors, the fathers and mother of nightmares. 

People forget, though, that they were born. 

That they were human once, and children.

They forget that Elijah was second, after Finn, so much older, followed, years later, by his second brother.

“His name is Niklaus,” Father said, as he knelt down and presented the bundle of screaming redness to little Elijah. “You must protect him.”

The children of Mikael are the monsters that will drink this earth dry.

But before, before all that, for a few years at the beginning of it all, there was only Elijah and his little brother, Klaus, with Finn watching from the sidelines, too old and too proud to be involved in their games.

+

People ask, time and again, why he won’t give up on Klaus. 

Why he doesn’t just walk away and leave the devil to his demons. 

And Elijah answers, always and without fail, “He is my brother.”

Family above all, always and forever. 

It’s not that he knows no other way. It’s just that he remembers the little boy that cried so horribly the first time Father raised a hand to him, because he did not understand what he had done wrong. 

He remembers little Nik, who wouldn’t speak for days after Mikael threw a goblet at him in a drunken rage, shouting, “You are not my son!”

He remembers what Niklaus sounded like before he learned to keep in his cries of pain. 

Even if he lives until the stars go out, he will always remember that.

+

Caroline understands, in her own way, and they share the occasional smile across a crowded room, like two people keeping the same secret. 

In a way, they are. 

There is a little boy under the monster, and they have both seen him. Better yet, they have seen his smile, that soft thing, fragile as a baby bird, even after a thousand years in darkness. 

They have seen it. 

They know Klaus’ secret. 

And they keep it. 

+

The first daggering is a mercy, really. At least Klaus, in his own way, thinks of it as that.

Finn has always been their mother’s son, her favourite, her firstborn. He misses her like a limb, grows angry and bitter in her absence. Where his siblings revel in their new existence, he despises it, rejects it. 

He throws biting insults, fists, kicks, cuts with words and fangs. He hates himself and takes it out on those that don’t. 

So when the hunter downs him with a dagger to the heart, Klaus is there, catching him, lowering him to the ground gently, so gently. The way he cradled Henrik, once, long ago. 

He whispers promises of peace in Finn’s ear, even as he pushes the dagger in deeper. 

Nine hundred years later, they wake their big brother and he dies only months after. All in all, Finn gets less than a century of actual living on this earth. 

Klaus smiles, bitter as bile and pours fifty year old scotch over a lonely grave in the woods. 

+

Here is a secret that doesn’t belong to Klaus, at least not alone: everything happens in cycles. Some span centuries, some only months, but everything, everything repeats. 

Petrova women and brothers. Brothers and sisters. Parents and children. 

Klaus and Elijah love Tatia, love Katerina in her turn. Katerina loves Stefan and Damon and Damon and Stefan love Elena, who is, in her own way, torn between Klaus and Elijah. 

Salvatores are echoes of Mikaelsons and Rebekah could find herself in Caroline, the littlest sister, if only she tried. Klaus hunts Katerina the way Mikael hunts him. John Gilbert condemns his only child, Mikael in the cruelty of his features, even as he thinks he’s saving her from monsters.

Katerina takes Esther’s place when she feeds the Salvatores Petrova blood and plots to murder them, to make them eternal, love and hate warring in her every move.

Round and round and round and don’t even get him started on the Petrova women themselves, reflections of reflections, all bound to the Originals, all hated and loved and adored by them, each in her own way, each exactly as the last. That is the point of them, Elijah sometimes thinks, they give birth to themselves and die in the names of the monsters that love them, now and then. 

Like snakes. 

+

Klaus goes around daggering their whole family and Elijah sees, in the madness in his gaze, that he is honestly doing it to protect them, murdering them to keep them safe from the monster that haunts his nightmares. 

Mikael ruined him, ruined them all, and Elijah can’t help but wonder what a world would look like in which Nik never broke. 

He’s glad he can’t imagine it.

+

He kisses Elena, just once, between life and death and blood and sacrifice. 

Kisses her, softly, the way he did a girl with her face, a thousand years ago. 

She gasps into his mouth, melts into his chest, bridging eternity.

He has forgotten what Tatia tasted like.

+

“Klaus says he wants to show me the world,” Caroline announces, like a challenge, like a question. When Elijah doesn’t react, she adds, “He says it’s a shame to waste away eternity in Mystic Falls.”

“Eternity is a very long time,” he agrees, disagrees, states. “And my brother would certainly make an interesting tour guide.”

She snorts, all fire and youth. “Yeah. Right. I can imagine it now. ‘And this is the place where I once sacrificed a dozen virgins to the devil. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the torture chambers. It’s a hands on experience, blah, blah.”

Despite himself, Elijah smiles, just a little, at the spitfire his brother has chosen to capture. And failed, apparently. At least so far. But then, they work on a different time scale than all other creatures in this world. 

He knows the girl wants his help, wants him to tell her how to deal with his brother. If he knew, he’d tell her, but he doesn’t. 

All he has to share is Klaus dancing through ruins, lamenting eternity with his arms spread wide, like all the world’s a stage for his pain. 

He says nothing.

+

He understands, for the first time in all these years, how Nik must have felt as a human, when Esther tries to kill them all.

Esther – Mother – it should not be so hard to refer to her by name, not after what she has done – made them and then tries to unmake them, simply because they took what she forced upon them and ran with it.

And that pain, that absolute knowledge that your own parents despise you, tastes like the bitterest blood on Elijah’s tongue. 

All he can see on Niklaus’ face is resignation and, worse than that, acceptance. To his little brother, this is an old song. 

When Esther dies, Elijah forbids himself from grieving for her. 

+

In New Orleans, at the turn of a century – which one? - Rebekah dances in the midday sun, her hair a gleaming ribbon in her wake. She sings the dirtiest shanty Eljiah has ever heard and laughs as Nik twirls her, round and round, until she can’t stop spinning. 

“Mercy,” she hollers through her laughter, “Mercy, Nik, I beg of you!”

Her big brother grins widely, spins her harder. “Why ever would I show you mercy, Bekah? This is so much more fun!”

Marcel, a boy of thirteen, watches from beside the oldest Mikaelson and asks, “Is it always like this?”

Elijah smiles and doesn’t say, “The situations change. The words remain the same.”

It is too early to burden the boy with truths about his new family.

+

Kol flits in and out of his siblings’ lives, unable or unwilling to face the past they embody.

He murders with abandon and, in a way, despite his distance, he is closer to Nik than all of them. 

He is the only one, out of them all, who never shies away from Nik. Even when the dagger comes down, he still grins, spitting blood in his brother’s face, angry and bitter and vicious, but he bears down on the blade in his heart, digs it in deeper, every bit as spiteful as Nik ever was.

+

This is half of Klaus’ secret: he was human once, before Mikael beat it out of him.

+

Rebekah has her own cycle, four verses on repeat throughout eternity.

One: their little sister, their sunshine, little Bekah, for decades or even centuries. 

Two: A man that catches her fancy, promises her stars, love, family. Most mean it, some don’t, but she loves them, oh, she loves them. 

Three: Klaus. Blood. Murder. The first time, the man truly is a danger to her, a threat with a dagger hidden under his pillow. But the second, third, tenth, they only die because Niklaus owns his siblings, all of them, and his sister most of all. He cannot stand being alone.

So he murders the men Rebekah loves and calls it her fault. 

Four: The aftermath, hate and rage and resentment, but never enough to break free.

Détente.

Repeat. 

+

Elena thinks she is completely different from Katerina.

She thinks she is above the games her ancestor plays, the tricks and lies. 

Elijah knows better. Elijah watched a quasi-orphaned girl with her child ripped from her womb turn, over the course of half a millennium, into the woman she is today, this loveless creature of habit, with fear so ingrained in her she doesn’t remember what life was like without it.

He watched Klaus turn the girl Elijah loved – Tatja’s first echo – into a copy of himself and he knows.

In five hundred years they may stand here again and he may not be able to tell them apart anymore.

The only difference between the Petrova women is time.

And Klaus is right, in his own way. They have too bloody much of that. 

+

One day, Elijah wakes up and cannot remember Henrik’s face.

The day after, he wakes up with the memory of his torn and shredded body burned into the back of his eyelids. He is glad for the memory. 

+

“How much longer,” he asks, New Orleans again, after yet another coup, another bloody battle that left the town red. “are you planning on doing this?”

Klaus looks up from where he’s scraping blood from under his nails with a letter opener. His face is smudged pink with a mixture of rain and his enemies’ insides. His grin is wicked and his eyes are soft and lost. “As long as there are fools to challenge me, brother. Why? Do you tire of it?”

Elijah laughs because, really, he passed tired five hundred years ago. This is something else entirely. 

And maybe it’s that realization, or maybe it’s the memory of the werewolves screaming as he helped rip them to shreds, that makes him give up on his dignity, for once. 

He drops to his knees by his brother’s chair, presses his forehead against a bony knee that once kicked him in his sleep every night. 

Finn and Kol are dead. Henrik is barely a memory. Rebekah is gone. 

Klaus inhales, sharply, just once. Then his hand comes to softly rest on top of Elijah’s head.

“I want it over with, Niklaus,” Elijah confesses in a shameless whisper. “I just want it over with.”

He hears his brother move above him, bending forward. Feels a bristly kiss pressed into his temple, too hard, as always. Then Klaus gently pushes him aside and stands. 

“I know,” he consoles, equally quiet, as he leaves to take a shower. 

+

“Always and forever,” Rebekah swears, over a grave Elijah dug with his own hands, Klaus by her side. 

She has no idea what she is invoking. 

+

+


End file.
